She’s worked with most of the great names of European cinema, from Godard to Haneke, and on one of Hollywood’s greatest disasters. Now she’s ready for your closeup quizzing
France has quite a few grandes dames of cinema, with Catherine Deneuve, Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Adjani all very much in the game. But none can hold much of a candle to Isabelle Huppert, who is firing on all cylinders as she enters her 70s, in her sixth decade of headline acting performances. Tightly wound and fiery, while simultaneously self-contained and tough as nails, Huppert’s acting persona has been instrumental to a string of masterpieces – and even if the film around her isn’t that great, she’s always magnificent to watch.
With so many amazing credits, stretching back to the 1970s, it’s hard to pick out a few, but we’ll have a go: early attention-grabbers like The Lacemaker and The Judge and the Assassin that graduated to fully-fledged lead performances in Loulou and Claude Chabrol’s Madame Bovary. Then the really extraordinary ones: La Cérémonie, Ruth Rendell’s scary domestic thriller; the traumatic and traumatising The Piano Teacher directed by Michael Haneke; Claire Denis’ steely White Material; and, of course, Paul Verhoeven’s transgressive rape thriller Elle, for which she was nominated for an Oscar.
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